The donors table I created earlier in the tour contains the street address for each donor. Panorama includes some features specific to addresses, so let me show you a few.
I’ll start by creating mailing labels. (Labels, of course, aren’t specific to addresses, and Panorama can print virtually any kind of label.) To do that I choose New Form from the View menu. I'll hold down the Control key as I use the menu, which tells Panorama to open the new form in a separate window.
The new form dialog appears. I type in the name of the form (in this case Mailing Labels) and press the QuickLabel button.
The next dialog is for specifying the label dimensions. I want to use standard 3-up Avery 5160 labels (the most common type) so I simply pick Avery 5160 from the pop-up menu, then press OK.
Now I need to lay out the text that goes on each label. I start by double clicking on first (in the left column), then press the Space key. Next I double click on last and press the Return key. I continue with double clicking and pressing the Return, Comma and Space keys until the label is finished.
When done I press the OK button. Here is the layout for the mailing labels. Panorama has automatically set up the top margin, left margin and body of the labels. I can use the graphic tools to adjust any of the dimensions, but in this the automatic setup is perfect.
I click the T-Square tool to switch from graphic layout mode to data mode. Now I can see a preview of what an actual label will look like.
To actually print the labels I simply choose Print from the File menu. To illustrate this I’ve printed the labels to a PDF file:
Panorama has a special wizard that allows data to be transferred back and forth between Panorama and applicatinos that support VCard data. I can open this wizard from a submenu in the Wizards menu.
The wizard displays the data from the current record in the database.
I can click on the globe icon to see the address displayed in an interactive map window.
I can click on the book icon to drag this address to a VCard aware application like Apple’s Address Book.
The same trick works in reverse — I can drag a person from the Address Book to the VCard wizard. This adds that person to the Panorama database. Since I’m working with a Rails synchronized database, I can then upload the new person (or persons) to the Rails table.
Continue the Tour —> What's Next?